Regarding the Pain of Others is a 2003 book-length essay by American writer Susan Sontag, which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award.[1][2] It was her last published book before her death in 2004. Sontag regarded the book as a sequel to her 1977 essay collection On Photography and reassessed some of the views she held in the latter.[3] The essay is especially interested in war photography. Using photography as evidence for her opinions, Sontag sets out to answer one of the three questions posed in Virginia Woolf's book Three Guineas, "How in your opinion are we to prevent war?"
While challenging a certain number of common ideas concerning images of pain, horror, and atrocity (including some to which she contributed), Regarding the Pain of Others both underscores their importance and undercuts hopes that they can communicate very much. On the one hand, narrative and framing confer upon images most of their meaning, and on the other, Sontag says, those who have not lived through such things "can't understand, can't imagine" the experiences such images represent.[4]
References- ^ Leonard, John (March 23, 2003). "Not What Happened but Why". The New York Times.
- ^ Conrad, Peter (2 August 2003). "What the eye can't see..." The Observer.
- ^ Moser, Benjamin (2019). Sontag: Her Life and Work. New York: Ecco. pp. 594–95. ISBN 978-0062896407.
- ^ Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 126.
- Susan Sontag. Looking at War. Photography's view of devastation and death. The New Yorker, 1 Dec 2002
